PayPal yet to fix costly 2 week-old bug

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PayPal has a bug in its payment system and it is costing its customers thousands of dollars while it remains unfixed. The bug stops new customers from paying someone through PayPal unless they both reside in the same country.

This would be a minor inconvenience if the bug had been fixed promptly, but for some reason it is still active today after being introduced on May 15 during an update. PayPal didn’t even register the bug until May 22 on its PayPal Developer Community site in a Live Site Notification where it said:

We are aware of the following 2 issues affecting website payments standard. We beleive these issues began after our last site update on May 15th, 2008 … For subscription signups, when trying to enter billing information users are not be able to change the country on the billing page … Our technical teams are working diligently to resolve the issue. We will provide updates until the issue is resolved.

The bug is making merchants very angry as it means no one from outside their country of origin can make purchases. For some this translates into thousands of dollars of lost revenue. It is also unclear why a fix is taking so long as the problem is just a drop-down box that keeps refreshing back to the merchant’s country, regardless of what country you select as a customer trying to pay.

I find it quite astounding that PayPal are letting such an issue go unresolved for such a long time. It is not acceptable for a service, which clearly markets itself as the best online payments system, to destroy merchant’s businesses that rely on sales from oversees.

Just because you can still buy within your country doesn’t mean this is not a serious issue. It is also compounded by the fact eBay will not allow you to use Google Checkout so a major alternative to PayPal cannot be used instead on one of the major sites for international sales.

As the Clicky Blog rightly points out, why is it taking this long to solve a drop-down box refresh problem? Has it been overlooked? Is the problem quite a difficult one they just aren’t telling us about? Hopefully the reasoning will become clear, but PayPal must issue an apology and rethink its updating processes as this is potentially merchant’s livelihoods they are playing with.